Storage systems in general, and block based storage systems specifically, are a key element in modern data centers and computing infrastructure. These systems are designed to store and retrieve large amounts of data, by providing data block address and data block content—for storing a block of data—and by providing a data block address for retrieval of the data block content that is stored at the specified address.
Storage solutions are typically partitioned into categories based on a use case and application within a computing infrastructure, and a key distinction exists between primary storage solutions and archiving storage solutions. Primary storage is typically used as the main storage pool for computing applications during application run-time. As such, the performance of primary storage systems is very often a key challenge and a major potential bottleneck in overall application performance, since storage and retrieval of data consumes time and delays the completion of application processing. Storage systems designed for archiving applications are much less sensitive to performance constraints, as they are not part of the run-time application processing.
In general, computer systems grow over their lifetime and the data under management tends to grow over the system lifetime. Growth can be exponential, and in both primary and archiving storage systems, exponential capacity growth typical in modern computing environment presents a major challenge as it results in increased cost, space, and power consumption of the storage systems required to support ever increasing amounts of information.